Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Roger Cohen calls it “The Islamic State of Molenbeek.” The
Brussels borough has become a self-contained outpost of the Islamic State, a
breeding ground for terrorists, a place that does not belong to Belgium or Europe.

Cohen reminds us that the inhabitants of this No-Go area are
not all recent refugees. Many are the children of immigrants whose families have been here for generations.

He explains:

The
large-scale immigration from Turkey and North Africa that began a half-century
ago at a time of economic boom has — at a time of economic stagnation — led to
near-ghettos in or around many European cities where the jobless descendants of
those migrants are sometimes radicalized by Wahhabi clerics. As the French
prime minister, Manuel Valls, warned recently, an extremist minority is
“winning the ideological and cultural battle” within French Islam.

Cohen is wrong to think that the battle is within Islam. The battle is
between Islam and the West. And it is not going to be solved by bringing more
unassimilable Muslim refugees into Europe. Cohen himself has favored this
approach. It’s time for him to rethink it.

For now he believes that Belgium and Europe can solve the
problem by shutting down radical clerics and by integrating young Muslims into
Europe. But, young Muslim men are incapable of doing the jobs that are available.

What matters is not so much what these young men are being
taught by Islamist clerics, but what they are not being taught: the skills that
would allow them to have good jobs in a modern economy. Sadly, this has been a
problem within Islam for centuries now. It will not be solved overnight.

Given the education they receive these young men will not be
able to do anything more than the most menial jobs. But, menial jobs are
demeaning, and they must think it better to gain status by becoming terrorists
and culture warriors than to sweep the streets.

Cohen believes that it’s a war about ideas and that the
authorities in places like Belgium should stop coddling Islamist clerics. And
they should surely impose law and order, by whatever means are necessary. One
remarks that when one Ted Cruz suggested targeting Muslim neighborhoods and
mosques he was roundly accused of being a bigot. Why would anyone imagine that
the best place to root out Islamist terrorists would be mosques?

In Cohen’s words:

After
the carnage in Paris and Brussels, the laissez-faire approach that had allowed
those clerics to proselytize, private Muslim schools to multiply in France,
prisons to serve as incubators of jihadism, youths to drift to ISIS land
in Syria and back, and districts like Molenbeek or Schaerbeek to drift into a
void of negligence, has to cease. Improved intelligence is not enough. There is
an ideological battle going on; it has to be waged on that level, where it has
been lost up to now. The moderate Muslim communities of Europe need to do much
more.

There is a lot more to this than the war of ideas. And, putting
the onus on the so-called moderate Muslims is empty rhetoric. It reminds me of
all the talk about the moderate Iranian clerics who are supposed to be our
friends.

If you think that the problem lies within Islam, you are
missing the point. If we want young Muslims to join the West, we need to believe
in the values that have made the West great. On that score, the intelligentsia,
especially the leftist commentariat, has failed. As Bret Stephens points out,
young Islamists do not merely draw lessons from the Quran. They learn about the
horrors of the West, and thus become more convinced of the righteousness of
their cause, by reading Western intellectuals, people like Noam Chomsky and
Michael Moore.

Stephens writes:

… these
jihadists are also sons of the West—educated in the schools of
multiculturalism, reared on the works of Noam Chomsky and perhaps
Frantz Fanon, consumers of a news diet heavy with reports of perfidy by
American or British or Israeli soldiers. If Islamism is their ideological drug
of choice, the political orthodoxies of the modern left are their gateway to
it.

When they read Chomsky do they see that the West is weak and
decadent, guilt-ridden, rotting from within… ready to submit to its new Muslim
masters? When they read radical leftists who offer up their steady diet of hatred for America and Israel,do they see any reason to join a losing team?

If Molenbeek is an outpost of the Islamic State in Europe,
so too is Israel an outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. When Western
intellectuals attack Israel, aren’t they demeaning and degrading their own
civilization? How then can they expect anyone to want to be part of it?

Cohen failed to notice that the West cannot win the war of
ideas against Islam if it does not believe in and practice its own values. Why
would young Muslims embrace the values and engage in the practices that define
Western civilization when they are told, by some of its best minds, that the
West is a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic organized criminal conspiracy designed to oppress and
exploit people of color, including Muslims? Why would they embrace Western
values when that means signing on to the transgender rights movement and
protesting laws that prevent men from using women’s restrooms. Why should
they join a culture—like Sweden-- that allows its daughters to be raped by
Muslim men with impunity?

It isn’t merely that leftist Westerners do not believe in
Western civilization. What they take to be exemplary of their culture, whether
it is transgender rights, same-sex marriage, hypersensitivity to any and all
slights, is not going to appeal to anyone who is not in on the joke.

We might believe that we have reached a state of
transcendent virtue and that we occupy the moral high ground. But the young
out-of-work jihadis who have nothing to lose believe that we could not possibly
have earned our wealth. They believe that their condition is our fault,
and that we must pay for that. We stole our success; we exploited and oppressed and colonized the darker skinned people of the world; we do not
deserve to hold on to it. We deserve to have it destroyed or deconstructed, as
the case may be.

Obviously, the radical left has no real interest in fighting
Islamist terrorism. From its own ideological perspective, the Islamist revolution
is a righteous reaction to the criminal conspiracy called Western civilization.
It’s the latest version of the great
Revolution that will overthrow the capitalist order and the Western patriarchy.

That is why idiot academics like Judith Butler can declare
that Hamas and Hezbollah are progressive causes. Of course, Butler is a sworn
enemy of the criminal regime called the state of Israel. She only differs from
the terrorist organizations because she rejects the use of violence.

Pusillanimous to a fault, Butler would be happy to see
the state of Israel destroyed by non-violent
means, through the actions of the anti-Semitic Boycott Divest
Sanction movement that she happily supports.

Radical leftists do not support violence. After all, they
want America and the West to disarm, unilaterally. And yet, when they see
violence perpetrated in the name of a revolutionary ideology, they silently
cheer it. Or else, they explain that the fault for 9/11 must lie with
the West or with the Mossad.

5 comments:

Progressive cause = Whoever is the "little guy." Regardless of the means or ends. Always.

Progressives watched too many movies as children.

Yet everything is "complex" and "nuanced" when there are bad results from activists or organizations that serve their cause. Meanwhile, they look at things they don't like, like guns, and want to ban it... flat out, black-and-white.

All of our wars in the Middle East and Africa over the past 25 years have proven pretty fruitless from a foreign policy perspective, but there has been one benefit. A couple million young American men and women got a good first-hand look at Islam.

Those of us who have been to the Middle East know how ugly Islam is when fully implemented. I don't want them or their crazy cult in my town or in my country.

An important thing in the history of Christendom happened at the Council of Nicaea. Constantine separated the church from the state by holding his position as a civil leader at this, Christianity first ecumenical council. His role was not interwoven with the church formally, which created the separation. Even when Rome became officially Christian, the division of church and state was settled effectively that the emperor would not also be head of the church, preserving the papacy as distinct. This moment had far-reaching consequences for how the church operates in Christendom, and should not be underestimated.

Islam has no such boundaries. It is all-encompassing. Ataturk's attempt to secularize Turkey was revolutionary, and has been secular, and the Islamists are making inroads. Islam is a spiritual, religious, social and political force across the Ummah. While Christianity is losing its position in the West, Islamism grows is the Islamic world.

Islam must undergo its own reformation in order for this to change. Don't hold your breath.